Burn: (Michael Bennett 7) Read online

  “Stay on your toes, Brooklyn. Don’t forget these guys used guns last time. Who knows what they have planned now.”

  “Don’t worry, boss,” Brooklyn said as I stared into the screen at the waves of people crisscrossing back and forth in front of Tiffany’s doors.

  “We got everything wired tight.”

  CHAPTER 90

  HONCHO, IN BAGGY BLUE Rockefeller Center maintenance coveralls, was sweeping some peanut shells and a cracked plastic spork out of the gutter outside the Five Guys across from the NBC studios on Forty-Eighth when he received the one-word text message.

  Ready

  He pocketed his phone and dropped the broom and dustpan into a wheeled garbage can on the sidewalk and immediately rolled it under the archway of a midblock pedestrian corridor beside Five Guys that cut straight through to Forty-Seventh Street. Thirty seconds later, he stepped out of the tunnel.

  And took a breath.

  He almost couldn’t believe it. Eighteen months of meticulous planning, and now it was actually happening. The final job was actually going down.

  He was smack-dab in the center of the bustling Diamond District.

  He stood for a moment, soaking in what some called the Wall Street of Diamonds. Lining both sides of the two-and-a-half-football-fields-long block were diamond shop after diamond shop, where stones changed hands to the tune of four hundred million dollars a day. Instead of being glitzy like the two jewelry stores he’d recently robbed, the closely packed stores seemed utilitarian, almost grimy.

  Honcho pulled up the sleeve of his coveralls and checked his watch. He swiped a drop of sweat from the back of his neck.

  T minus three minutes and counting, he thought, taking another ragged breath. Counting to what, though? That was the question.

  He moved north up the sidewalk, pushing the garbage can alongside a Ryder Eurovan, a Brink’s armored truck, a UPS truck, and a FedEx truck, then two more huge armored vans. The vans were from none other than Malca-Amit, the premier international diamond-shuttling security firm based in Israel, which transported diamonds between the major diamond hubs of Tel Aviv and Antwerp and Mumbai and New York City.

  On the sidewalk beside the trucks were scores of tourists and armored car guards and merchants. Most of the merchants, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, were the descendants of the Jewish Europeans who had fled Antwerp for the United States after 1940, when Hitler invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, Honcho knew. There was little about the block that he didn’t know, having cased it for almost the last two years.

  Honcho was rolling the can past a kneeling bike messenger chaining his ride to the pedestal of a phoneless phone kiosk when he spotted the sketchy gray work van with tinted windows across the street.

  What the hell? he thought, eyeing it.

  Honcho slowed and swallowed, his heart pounding, his breath suddenly on hold. There was something wrong.

  CHAPTER 91

  HONCHO HAD GOTTEN THE rhythms of the block down pat over the last year, had made sure to note most of the service firms that worked the block. Especially in the last few weeks. That was how fine-tuned his research had been. But he’d never seen this van before.

  It took him another second to figure it out. The markings on its door said it was from a Queens glass company. But the rig on the van’s side held no panes of glass.

  It was cops. Shit! No doubt about it, he thought. He had figured there would probably be more heat than usual after his last two jobs, but it had been an abstract thought. Actually seeing the cops right there twenty feet away was blood-chilling. He could practically feel the lens of the surveillance van’s camera tracking him as he passed it.

  How many undercovers are around me right now? he thought, panicking suddenly. And what if they had gotten a decent look at him from a camera on one of the previous jobs?

  He started sweating more then, under his arms, down his legs. Black spots started to dance in his peripheral vision. Everything was riding on this last job. Thousands and thousands of dollars and eighteen months of meticulous planning. But it didn’t matter, he finally decided. He couldn’t do it. It was useless. His nerve had imploded. The cops were onto them. It was over. It wasn’t going to work.

  Besides, he already had a couple of million in stones. He needed to just keep rolling, roll right the hell down to the end of the block, drop the garbage bucket on the corner, and walk right down the stairs to the Rockefeller Center subway station. In a matter of hours, he’d be down to Miami, living out the rest of his life, day after day, fishing the blue water during the day and the bars at night, like Hemingway.

  It was definitely plan B, but it was a damn sight better than going back to jail. It would be real jail this time, he knew. No thanks. Time to fold them and cut and run.

  Screw his friends who were waiting on him and would probably get busted in about a minute and a half’s time, he thought. Sorry, fellas. Every man for himself. Just keep moving. Walk away.

  Honcho was just about to do it, too. Get out, pull the plug, abort the whole heist.

  That was when he suddenly noticed the traffic sawhorse on the street. A word was stenciled in black on the orange-and-white-striped board. One word.

  TRIUMPH

  The silent toll of a bell went off in Honcho’s head. He felt an almost holy chill down his spine as his nerve returned stronger than ever. He could see it clearly now. There was no more reason to panic.

  “Triumph,” Honcho whispered to himself as his watch finally beeped once and the first clattering alarm began to blat.

  CHAPTER 92

  I WAS OUT OF MY chair, rolling my stiff neck and doing a standing calf stretch against one of the cold, depressing metal walls in the cramped cube of the surveillance truck, when Arturo, sitting in front of the monitor behind me, let out a whistle.

  There was movement on the tiny screen of the laptop connected to the truck’s hidden camera. A black Lincoln Town Car with tinted windows was slowing alongside Tiffany’s famous stainless-steel front doors. As it came to a stop, Arturo pointed the protein bar he was eating at the top of the screen, where a construction worker, a big thick-necked white guy in a kelly-green hard hat, was jogging across the avenue directly at the store.

  Remembering the construction outfits the thieves had used in the first Manhattan heist, I immediately lifted the strap of the shotgun propped in the corner. But before I could even turn for the truck’s gate, the hulking hard hat passed by Tiffany’s harmlessly down Fifty-Seventh as a couple of white-haired octogenarian ladies-who-lunch types emerged from the Town Car.

  False alarm, I thought, relieved, as I laid the long gun carefully back down.

  But I thought wrong.

  A split second later, a double chirp came from one of the radios on the upended milk crate we were using for a table. The shrill sound of it pinged almost painfully off the metal walls. It was radio #3, the one for Brooklyn’s team. It blooped again three more times rapidly as I lifted it. Something was up.

  “Mike here. What is it?” I said.

  “Mike, we have something here!” she said frantically. “We have alarms going off!”

  “Alarms? For which store?”

  “All of them, I think!” she said. “We’re looking at multiple alarms up and down the block. We’re breaking cover from our van. People are looking freaked out in the street. I think you should get over here, Mike. Now!”

  My thumb shook slightly as I hovered it over the heavy police radio’s key. I stared at Tiffany’s on the monitor again, trying to think fast.

  Was this a head fake? I wondered. Was this a ruse to get us over to the Diamond District so the thieves could then hit Tiffany’s?

  There was no time to figure it out. I put down Brooklyn’s radio and lifted the one for Doyle and the two Midtown North Precinct detectives who were stationed inside Tiffany’s security room.

  “Heads up, Doyle,” I said as I pointed for Arturo to get behind the truck’s wheel. “We need to get over to the Diam
ond District. You stay put, but look sharp. You’re on your own for the time being.”

  CHAPTER 93

  WE JUMPED INTO THE truck’s cab, and Arturo turned it over with a roar, and we made a suicidal, multiple-horn-inducing left turn through the red light onto Fifth. Ten blocks later, we could hear the incredibly high-pitched clanging of alarms as we got out on the sidewalk by one of the plastic-diamond-topped lampposts that flank Forty-Seventh Street.

  The scene on the street was chaos on steroids. To the west down the block, diamond industry workers were pouring onto the sidewalks. On the street, armored car guards had weapons drawn beside their trucks. As if the deafening alarms weren’t enough, from somewhere came the strong, acrid stench of smoke and burnt rubber.

  A fire? Or was it a bomb? I thought.

  The sound of sirens joined in with the alarms a moment later as Midtown North squad cars began arriving on both sides of the block. I stared at faces in the milling crowd, trying to eyeball any of our suspects. Instead, out of the chaotic swirl came Brooklyn and Robertson, running.

  “What’s up with the smoke?” was the first thing I said.

  “We don’t know,” Robertson said. “All we know is five minutes ago most of the store alarms on the south side of the street just started going off at once.”

  “We’ll have to start checking the stores one by one,” I said loudly over the bedlam. “Arturo and I will start on this end. You guys head down the other end and grab some uniforms for backup and start working your way back toward the middle. Take your time and do this by the book, guys. We know these guys are armed and dangerous. There’s potential for a hostage situation, OK? Potential for any damn thing, so be careful.”

  Arturo and I grabbed the first two uniforms we could and told them the plan. The male-female patrol team nodded, pale-faced and wide-eyed. They looked like raw rookies just out of high school, which wasn’t making me happy, considering they’d be behind me with drawn firearms. Too bad we didn’t have time to complain to the personnel department.

  I peered through the bulletproof window of the first luxury jewelry store whose alarm was jangling on the southeast corner of Fifth and Forty-Seventh. I couldn’t see much because the inside of the store was obscured by the tiers of diamond rings and necklaces and watches. I hefted my Remington pump and pulled the door open.

  “NYPD!” I yelled.

  Inside were four baffled-looking female clerks holding their ears as they pointed us to a back room. Inside it, behind a steel desk, a broad-shouldered, slightly bug-eyed middle-aged man was hollering in Yiddish into a cell phone. A chunky revolver held down a clutter of invoices on the blotter in front of him like a paperweight.

  “What is this? What’s going on?” the balding owner said. “Why are all my alarms going off?”

  “We’re not sure yet, sir,” I said. “Are you OK? Is everybody OK? Did you see anything? Is your safe secure?”

  “We’re fine. Everything’s OK,” the owner said, rubbing at his eyes. “I just checked the safe in the basement. It’s fine. My alarm is going off for some reason, and the alarm company won’t even pick up. What is this? Terrorism? My cousin Moshe up near Sixth said he heard there was an explosion?”

  I didn’t have time to stay and chat with the man. Or his cousin, for that matter. We immediately cleared out to the sidewalk and were about to go into the jewelry store next door, whose alarm was wailing, when my radio blooped.

  “Mike!” Robertson said. “You need to get up here. Sixth Avenue. We’re at the bank and it’s locked. The front door of the bank is locked!”

  “The bank?” Arturo and I said in unison as we stared at each other. Then we took off west through the churning crowd.

  CHAPTER 94

  ABOUT A HUNDRED FIFTY feet in from Sixth Avenue, Robertson and Brooklyn were standing with a trio of uniforms by the front door of a branch of the Northwest River Bank.

  A lot of banks in New York are the old-fashioned fancy columned granite jobs, but this one was a storefront affair like a dry cleaner or a pharmacy. It was the only bank on the block, I quickly noticed. In fact, it looked like the only establishment on the block that wasn’t a diamond store.

  I pulled at the glass double doors, and like Robertson had said they wouldn’t budge. They were definitely locked.

  A Midtown Manhattan bank just up and closes in the middle of a Friday? I thought. Not likely. In fact, impossible.

  I cupped my eyes and leaned my forehead against the cool glass. Same as in the two stores we’d been to, the bank’s alarm was firing on all pistons. Past the ATM foyer through a second set of glass doors, I could see the teller counter beyond the stanchions for the customer line. But there were no tellers at the counter and no customers on line.

  I called over a patrol cop, who handed me a tactical knife that had a tungsten carbide glass-breaking tip on the bottom of its handle. It was incredible how thoroughly and easily the door shattered when I leveled the tip perpendicular to the glass and gave it a slight tap. I cleared the glass and crawled in under the push handle, and then repeated the process on the locked glass door on the other side of the ATM foyer.

  Inside, in the corner of the bank to the right, ten feet from the door, a dozen or so wide-eyed people were lying bound and gagged in a line on the industrial carpet. There were several male and female tellers, two Hasidic Jews in funeral black, a security guard, even a female traffic cop. All of them with their ankles and wrists and mouths wrapped with heavy-duty duct tape.

  Pegging a thin middle-aged man in a dark-gray suit on the far end of the line as the manager, I flicked open the blade of the tactical knife I was still holding as I hurried over, and cut the tape off his wrists.

  “Three men,” he whispered immediately after he peeled the tape off his lips.

  He pointed animatedly at a corridor on the other side of the bank by the tellers’ counter.

  “They went down that hall for the basement vault maybe ten minutes ago,” he said in hushed panic. “Be careful. They have guns. Machine guns, it looked like. I believe they’re still down there.”

  CHAPTER 95

  I HANDED HIM THE knife to free the others as Arturo, Robertson, Brooklyn, and three other cops followed me toward the hall. Beyond an empty office was a stairwell that went down to a half-flight landing and then made a blind turn.

  “Mike, this is nuts, man,” Arturo whispered, wiping his sweaty hand on his jeans before retightening his grip on his Glock. “We can’t handle machine guns, can we? Shouldn’t we get ESU for this?”

  I put a finger to my lips before I tiptoed down the stairs and waited by the turn in the stairs, listening carefully. The only thing I could hear was the muffled clang of alarms still going off outside, so I shot a quick peek around the corner.

  At the bottom of the stairs, a pudgy thirty-something black bank guard sat gagged and duct-taped like the folks upstairs. As I stared at him from up the half flight of stairs, showing him my shield, I thought he might indicate with his eyes where the still-unseen thieves were in relation to him. But he only stared at me in terror as he tried to say something through the gag of tape.

  I finally went down the last flight of stairs over the barrel of the shotgun. Past the neutralized guard was the thick steel door of a huge floor-to-ceiling vault. It was wide open. The vault filled the basement space, and I could tell immediately that it was empty. The thieves were gone.

  “Where’d they go?” I said to the guard as Arturo cut his hands free and helped him take the gag off his mouth.

  “They got something from the vault and went back up the stairs,” the guard said between hyperventilating breaths.

  “How long ago?” I said.

  “Five, maybe six minutes.”

  I stared at him as I hurriedly thought about that. The manager upstairs would have seen them leave through the front. But he hadn’t. He thought they were still down here.

  “Brooklyn, Robertson,” I said. “They must have gone up the stairs and left out the b
ack of the bank somehow. Get up there and check.”

  They ran back up the stairs, and I poked my head into the vault and looked down at its floor, thinking I’d see it completely trashed like at the first jewelry store. But it was surprisingly clean. There was nothing on the concrete floor. Everything was as neat as a pin.

  Everything except for one small anomaly.

  Above and a little to the right of center of the wall of steel triple-key safe-deposit boxes, a small box—little bigger than an apartment house mailbox—stood open. Its stainless-steel door was scratched up and mangled, hanging off one hinge.

  I clicked on a small flashlight from my belt and walked over and played its beam over the interior of the empty metal slot.

  “What the hell?” Arturo said. “These guys knock over two diamond stores and then they come in here for this one little bank box? Was it a special kind of diamond in there, maybe?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t diamonds,” I said. “Maybe it was never about diamonds at all.”

  We stood there dumbfounded for another ten seconds, thinking about that.

  “OK, I’ll say it if you won’t,” Arturo finally said. “What in the hell could have been in that little box?”

  CHAPTER 96

  THE THIEVES HADN’T FLED out the back of the bank, we quickly learned.

  They’d exited through the bank’s ceiling.

  It was Arturo who found the rope ladder in the bank’s janitor closet. Though it looked like it was from a child’s swing set, it was surprisingly sturdy when I went up it into what looked like a vacant office on the bank building’s second floor. My eyes went directly to an open window, outside of which I could see scaffolding extending from the construction site to the east of the bank.